Director: Wes Craven
Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp, John Saxon, Amanda Weiss, Nick Corri, Ronee Blakely, Charles Fleischer
Music by: Charles Bernstein
Taglines: “She is the only one who can stop it… if she fails, no one survives.”
“If Nancy Doesn’t Wake Up Screaming She Won’t Wake Up At All…”
“Sleep Kills”
“A scream that wakes you up, might be your own…”
“Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep…or you’ll meet the terrifying Freddy.”
STORY
A group of high school friends are all experiencing the same strange dream where a man with a horribly burned face and a razor-sharp knifed glove is trying to kill them. One of them is horribly murdered in her sleep, and they learn the horrifying truth behind their town’s history and the child murderer in their dreams.
OPINION
(Warning, there are many spoilers here, but a movie this classic deserves some spoiler-ish discussion IMHO. If you haven’t seen it, do so now!)
By 1984, the slasher craze that had been in full swing since the release of Friday the 13th in 1980 was dying down. The problem with the genre was that the films were too repetitive and cheap – anybody with a camera could make them, and often did. Even the flagship franchises were starting to die down – the fourth Friday The 13th film promised Jason Voorhees’ permanent demise, while Halloween’s 3rd instalment avoided Michael Myers completely. The genre desperately needed fresh blood.
It came in the form of Wes Craven. Not a newcomer himself, Craven had been languishing among some pretty poor projects since the double-whammy release of The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes in the 1970s. Since deciding to leave his tenure as an English professor in order to pursue movie-making full time, Craven hadn’t really found a project to match these earlier successes. He’d made a few TV movies (Summer Of Fear, Invitation To Hell), a fairly bad comic book adaptation (Swamp Thing) and a mediocre rural cult thriller (Deadly Blessing). None of these movies are particularly great, although they were unspectacularly profitable.
During this period, Craven was trying to sell the script for Elm Street, but found it very difficult to get funding. Apart from the fact that studios were trying to distance themselves from the slasher craze amid accusations of misogyny and exploitation, the script demanded far more than the standard slasher script. Rather than a simply maniac with a knife, elaborate effects sequences were called for thus making the budgetary requirements somewhat higher than average. In what would prove to be the best decision since Parlophone signed the struggling Beatles, producer Robert Shaye approved the rejected script despite his company New Line edging perilously close to bankruptcy.
The result is one of the most perfect horror movies of the 80s. The movie starts off with an intriguing credit sequence showing Freddy constructing his now-iconic razor-fingered glove.This is followed by the film’s first dream sequence which has a teenager by the name of Tina running from Freddy in an also-iconic boiler room. She manages to wake up before Freddy gets to her, but is shocked to notice a number of cuts on her nightdress in the same configuration as Freddy’s glove. From here, we’re introduced to the main characters and another of the movie’s strengths – the characters. In many other slasher movies, the teenagers are merely ciphers – the jock, the slut, etc., along with an innocent who will turn out to the the “final girl” who fends off the killer in the final reel. Any characterisation is left for the killer, and even that’s usually paper-thin.
Here, however, all of the characters are given some form of depth. Tina doesn’t get much screen time, but she’s intriguingly teased as being a possible lead and comes across as a normal teenager. Her boyfriend starts off as a stereotypical hoodlum, but shows a nice degree of sympathetic depth after she dies. Nancy is also pretty well-rounded, and reacts to the situations with a degree of believability, while her boyfriend Glen is less shaded but never rings false. This characterisation extends to the adult characters – initially set up as unsympathetic adults and pretty poor people, their actions and mannerisms become very believable when you find out why they are that way.
Which brings us to Freddy’s back-story. A far cry from the wisecracking stand-up comic he became in later sequels, Freddy Krueger is a truly despicable character. A child molester and child murderer, Freddy had managed to escape justice on a technicality. In response, the townsfolk gang together, trap Freddy in his boiler room and burn him alive.It’s an interesting cycle of revenge with more layers than the average prank-gone-wrong kind of story behind many slashers, and it works extremely well.
This brings up on to the other real star of the show – the dream sequences. Later sequels had a habit of sticking to an annoying rut. They would introduce a character trait or phobia early in the movie, which Freddy would then exploit later on – for example the bug-hating girl in part 4 who gets turned into a cockroach. None of that by-the-numbers writing is present here. Craven creates a truly nightmarish dream world where literally anything is possibly, and you can’t tell what will happen next. It’s truly surreal, and while a few effects don’t work very well, the ideas present are flawless. The appearance of Tina’s body being dragged inside a body bag along a school corridor, and later with bugs coming out of her mouth are the things that nightmares are truly made of, while elements like Glen’s geyser-like death and Freddy’s mouth on the phone are surrealism at its finest. Meanwhile, Freddy does have a macabre sense of humour – displayed here by the aforementioned telephone scene and his chopping off his own fingers to freak people out – but it’s very unstated here.
The final piece of the puzzle is the cast. As well as a very young Johnny Depp, we have a great mix of genre stalwarts as the adults (John Saxon and Ronnee Blakely) and newcomers as the teens. The real human star of the show is Englund. His performance – often the only thing worth watching in the sequels – is fantastic with the menacing, sadistic Krueger laced with humanity and even pathetic cowardice when the moment call for it. There’s a very good reason why (unlike other slasher franchises), nobody else has played the villain in this series until Jackie Earle Haley from this year’s reboot.
There are a few problems, but none of them major. A few effects have always been a little ropey – for example, you can see where the pools of liquid are on the stairs before Nancy steps in them during the climax – but that’s forgiveable. The endings are the real problem, first the “demise” of Freddy through non-belief seems to contradict the “let’s bring him into the real world so we can kill him” thrust of the whole movie. meanwhile the end shot of Nancy’s mother being pull through the door is laughable. Otherwise, a near-flawless masterpiece.
If you’d have asked me as a kid which was the best of the Elm Street movies,I would probably have said part 3. While that film is still excellent, some of it hasn’t dated particularly well, whereas this original is still fantastic for most of its running time.
Rating: 
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one of the best. i do wish they had made freddy child molester as well as killer in the final film.
Great article! I actually saw Part 2 and 4 before the original, and while I love them both, they don’t compare to Part 1 in terms of scariness. I remember actually being surprised as a kid when I finally saw it by how unsettling it was compared to its sequels, which turned Freddy into an anti-hero. I consider it Wes Craven’s best film by far.